“Remember,’ she said, “he’s not star. He’s merely a character in your story.”

“Okay.”

“He can’t fall in love,” she said.

“Why not?”

“He’s already married.”

“Okay.”

Susan writes romance with a lot of action and adventure.

I write thrillers.

Usually they are historical thrillers, set during the 1930s and 1940s with the evil threats of Nazi Germany hanging like storm clouds over Europe.

The Special Forces assignment was different.

The stories are a fresh as yesterday.

I had to create a modern-day hero. I had to write in the present.

I’m far more comfortable in the past.

I sat down at my word machine, and Roland Sand introduced himself.

He’s CIA.

At least, he was.

He works within a rogue intelligence unit in an office that doesn’t exist, inside a building that doesn’t exist, somewhere between a pair of mountains that don’t exist.

He’s an assassin.

But he has a conscience.

He falls in love.

He’s a stranger to affairs of the heart.

He receives his assignment.

Kill the President.

Is it sanctioned?

It is.

Who ordered the hit?

Someone in the government.

Why must the President die?

He’s a weak President. He’s losing in the polls. He will lead his party to defeat, and no one wants to lose in the game of politics.

It’s been a bad winter.

It’s about to get worse.

It’s a cold day.

It’s a cold war.

For the product description of Lovely Night to Die on Amazon, I wrote:

Roland Sand has killed two government operatives sent to execute him. He is arrested and represented in court by a beautiful young public defender, Eleanor Trent. Their eyes connect. So do their hearts, but both keep their feeling buried deep inside them.

Eleanor does not know that Sand is an assassin for a rogue intelligence agency that sells its deadly services to foreign nations as well as to its own country. He has angered his chief, the one-eyed Bohemian, by refusing to kill an accountant who accidentally saw the details of a top-secret mission. Sand sees no reason why an innocent man should die.

The Bohemian’s agents kidnap Sand and take him from the Durango, Colorado, jail. He is given one chance to redeem himself. He must carry out the assignment to assassinate the President of the United States. It is a mission sanctioned from inside the United States government.

Eleanor is furious, and she is frightened. She has lost cases before. But never has she lost a client. In desperation, he calls Navy SEAL Commander Patrick Hurt to help her track down the missing Roland Sand. She handled a case for one of Hurt’s friends years earlier, and he said she could count on him if she ever needed him.

At Midway Airport, Sand awaits the arrival of Air Force One. The President comes down the steps, and Sand sees Eleanor in the greeting committee. He is told, “Kiill the President or we kill the lady.” He has only a second to make up his mind.

And Patrick Hurt knows, if necessary, he must kill Sand to save the President.

***

The novella first saw the light of day on Amazon Tuesday.

How would it do?

That’s the fear we all have.

The story was more thriller than romance.

Susan’s Kindle Worlds novellas are produced by some of the finest writers in the market today.

They’re all women.

I’m not.

So what would happen?

By the time I first saw Lovely Night to Die on Amazon this morning, the book had climbed to number 7 in Kindle Worlds mystery, suspense and thrillers.

The story is all about secrets, conspiracies, love, lies, and assassinations.